Rosemary's Baby

Yay for elderly satanists and demon babies! Tonight's film was Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, another classic that's slipped through the cracks of my horror watching. What a great movie... and a movie that really defied what I expected of it. A slow burner like much of classic horror (see The Exorcist, The Omen, etc), this movie delivers on the journey unlike The Innkeepers from yesterday. Up until the ending the movie is constantly making the viewer ask the question of whether the main character is crazy or if her elderly next door neighbors are really devil worshipers. Spoiler alert: they are, and they like to have dinner parties based around the spawn of satan. 

On that subject, the ending of the movie is probably what I found most surprising: a satanist dinner party. Rosemary finds her baby as the center of attention of the party, guests fawning over her as they proclaim "God is dead! Satan lives!" I guess it answers the age old question: what do satanists do when they get old? Well, they get together, play the recorder, and rock demon babies in a bassinet.

I kid, but in all honestly that's what I liked about the movie. It ended so out of left field (namely, Rosemary seemingly deciding to take care of her devil child at the close) and the journey to get there was tense and fear-filled as you watched Rosemary descend into madness. Also of note is the almost experimental impregnation scene (that's a sentence I didn't think I'd ever write), a scene that is at once horrifying and beautifully shot.

9/10